


got the number thirteen tattooed on my neck

by inkandcayenne



Category: True Detective
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-15
Updated: 2014-10-15
Packaged: 2018-02-21 06:04:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2457566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkandcayenne/pseuds/inkandcayenne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“My life's been a circle of violence and degradation as long as I can remember.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	got the number thirteen tattooed on my neck

**Author's Note:**

> For the True Detective Halloween challenge.

> _Got a long line of heartache, I carry it well_  
>  _The list of lives I've broken reach from here to hell_  
>  _Bad luck wind been blowing at my back_  
>  _I pray you don't look at me, I pray I don't look back_  
>  _I was born in the soul of misery, never had me a name_  
>  _They just gave me the number when I was young_  
>  \--Johnny Cash

i.

“You ever seen a man’s guts outside his body?”

It’s one of the first things Rust ever remembers him saying, after _hey, kid, I’m your old man_.

ii.

There’s an old wino in a ramshackle cabin on the other side of the clearing, the only place in the borough more pathetic and broken-down than the Cohle place.  Peterson, they call him.  He buys that shit that Travis brews out in the back of the woods, until he stops buying and takes to helping himself.  The second time he does it, he’s caught in the act and he and Rust’s old man have words, and when that’s not enough to make him give up the three jars of shine hidden under his coat, words turn into fists.  

Rust, four and a half, is watching from the window through a blur of early-autumn snow, so he’s never quite sure what he sees: whether Peterson lands the wrong way on the pilfered jars and a bit of broken glass catches him in the throat, or whether what happens is something more… deliberate.  All he knows is that Travis stands there a minute, and then goes and pulls the large sledge out of the shed, the one he uses to bring carcasses of elk and bear back to the cabin.  

Rust walks to the front door and watches his father haul the motionless form onto the sledge. The snow is coming faster now.  “You need my help, Papa?” he asks.  Travis always has him help: _Pull your own weight, kid.  Ain’t nothing in this world comes free._

“Get in the house,” Travis says, voice gruffer than usual.  Snow is falling on the dark shape without melting, a thick, driving snow that covers the stains on the ground.  He returns to the shed and comes back with a shovel and an axe.  “You stay inside.  I’ll be back before morning.”

He never tells Rust to keep quiet about it.  He doesn’t have to.

iii.

Rust is six the first time he shoots at a deer, seven the first time he actually hits one, but his aim is off and he catches it in the throat.  It runs off into the brush, leaving splashes of bright blood as it goes.  

They’ve been tracking nearly five hours and his legs are giving way beneath him; he turns to his father, hollow-eyed, pleading.   _Surely_ they can turn back now.  But Travis’s face is stony.  “Get going,” he says.  “Easy to follow the trail now.”

Ten minutes of walking along a line of slick red drips before they find the doe, collapsed on its side, ribs heaving weakly.  The arrow sticks up at a sick angle like the gnomon on a sundial.  “You got your knife,” Travis says.

“She’s dying anyway,” Rust says, his voice very small.  “I don’t gotta.”

“You don’t ever leave somethin’ suffering when you can make a clean break of it, kid.”

The knife catches on the windpipe and he has to jerk hard.  It’s November and cold, and the blood gushing over his hands feels very warm.  

iv.  

It happens every winter, across town or on the other side of the borough, or far away in a place you’ve never heard of, to a neighbor or a neighbor’s cousin or an old classmate.  Sometimes you see the squad car or the hearse but usually you’ll see nothing at all, just hear the cold whispers that seep along the streets like gathering ice.  Some years it’s a shotgun and some years it’s an axe or some blunt object or a strangling hand or a brutal fist.  A lover, a spouse, an entire family.  But always the same disease, that madness that sweeps through the bush every year like a howling, pestilent wind.

 _Cabin fever_ , they call it.

v.

Rust is twelve when he gets a job sweeping up broken glass and mopping up puke at the local hole-in-the-wall nightspot.  One evening, Roy Morris’s ex-wife comes in with her new beau, and Roy blows them both to kingdom come with his double-barreled shotgun.

Afterwards Rust spends almost an hour with the cops, staring at the floor where blood seeps into sawdust and mixes with ice melted off boots, answering their questions mechanically and precisely.  He feels bad for providing the information that will put Roy Morris in cuffs, but only a little.  Sonofabitch never tipped the barkeep, and he pissed all over the restroom when he was drunk.

“You got a good eye, son,” the officer says, closing up his notebook.  “You should think about becoming a cop.”

vi.

Twelve years of spitballs and stolen bikes and dead squirrels stuffed in his backpack coalesce one morning two weeks before graduation when Rust, finding gum pressed between the pages of his copy of _Attack Upon Christendom_ , rises up during second-period calculus and beats the ever-loving fuck out of Sean McElhaney.  The other students crowd in a corner of the room, afraid to get in his way.  By the time two teachers and a janitor manage to pull him away, three of Sean’s teeth, a sizeable pool of his blood, and a handful of his blond hair decorate the linoleum floor.

“If we suspend him,” Rust hears the principal say as he sits outside the office with an icepack pressed to his bruised knuckles, “he’ll miss his final exams and fail his classes, and then we’ll have to put up with the weird little shit for another year.  McElhaney’s ma’s too busy occupying the town drunk tank to bother to press charges.  Let’s just let this one slide.”

vii.

Everyone else in his unit, whether they admitted it or not, was terrified of the first time they’d take a life.  “I don’t think you’re understanding the implications of the phrase _Cold War_ ,” Rust would say repeatedly, until someone finally punched him.  But it was the same thing in the police academy--half of them had joined up because some part of them _wanted_ to lay a motherfucker out, and yet they were all scared shitless at the prospect.  Everyone except Rust.  It had felt inevitable for as long as he could remember; he just wanted to get it over with.

It finally happens after about six months on the job.  There’s no question that it’s justified.  The liquor store robber is a scared kid, true, but a scared kid with a semiautomatic spraying bullets all over the parking lot.  Rust drops him with a shot to the head, clean enough that a skilled undertaker with a little putty and foundation will be able to give him an open casket.  

Counseling is mandatory, especially the first time you exhibit lethal force.  They keep a therapist on retainer purely for the purpose.  “No one thinks you did anything wrong,” she says, her voice like a cool breeze blowing across an empty plain.  “This is a safe space for you to express your feelings about the event.”

Rust doesn’t have any feelings to express--he doesn’t think he did anything wrong, either--but he doesn’t believe in safe spaces.  He thinks for a moment about how a regular person would feel, and then feigns the appropriate level of shock and guilt.  They cut him loose after only three sessions.

viii.

Eventually he will tell Maggie Hart _one, she passed_ and he will tell her husband _we had a baby girl, she died_ and much later he will say _we lived in a little bend in the road, and they said--_

But he will never, ever say, not to any friend or doctor or shrink or priest: _there was blood coming from her ears, her eyes were blackened by the impact, I remember the last breath that came whistling out of her lungs.  It sounded like wind through the trees._

xix.

“What I don’t understand,” McKenna says, alternating between gulps of Maalox and heavily spiked coffee, “is why a guy with aim as good as yours, even fucked up as you were, needs to shoot an unarmed, 130-lb. methhead _eleven times_.”

“I only had eleven rounds left,” he answers.  

x.

“I can’t get close,” Rust says.  He pulls another napkin from the dispenser and starts in on methodically tearing it into tiny pieces.  “They think I’m too smart to get my hands dirty.”

“Prove ‘em wrong,” Morales replies, putting his cigarette out in the apple pie Rust has barely touched; and so when a member of a rival club won’t give up the location of some guns under a fair amount of duress, Crash asks to join the party.  Ginger hands over a set of pliers and watches him closely.  

Ten minutes later, three of the IC are off to pick up the guns.  Ginger motions someone inside to sweep up the fingernails, then turns to Crash and gives him a wide grin.

He feels like he’s about to puke, but it’s the first time in a good long while that anyone’s looked at him with anything resembling approval.

xi.

He’s a little annoyed that Marty blew the sonofabitch away before he had a chance to get some answers--like why the fucking antlers, for starters.  There’s bits of brains and blood and skull fragments in the gravel, and he finds himself trying to read them, like tea leaves.

“I walked away from the experience with a greater respect for the sanctity of human life,” he says.

xii.

He wants to jump over the table and put his fist through her face so many times that there’s no recognizable features left.  Instead he reaches out and takes her hand; it’s damp with sweat, chipped polish on the nails.  He thinks about the banality of evil and the unbearable limitations of justice.   _Vendetta, wergild, kataki-uchi. Nemo me impune lacessit._ He thinks about payphones in remote locations, mysterious callers that can kill with a voice, and wonders what the last thing Guy Francis ever heard sounded like; he imagines sympathetic words belied by a low, menacing tone.  He wants to put his ballpoint pen through her eye, to put his hands around her throat and squeeze until he hears her windpipe snap.  But this will do.

“If you get the opportunity,” he says, “you should kill yourself.”

xiii.

Among violent men, everything is an act of violence: fixing a drink, holding a baby, touching a woman.  When Marty emerges from the station without his tie or class ring, that’s a gesture of his intentions.  So is Rust showing up at the station when he knows Marty will be here.  All violence is premeditated.  

Everything leading up to this was merely preamble: a fist that’s taken seven years to reach his jaw.  That first bright bloom of pain is like letting out a breath held too long; it feels so good that he lets it happen twice, three times before he starts to fight back.  He should lie down on the fucking asphalt and take his beating like a man--he doesn’t deserve anything better than that--but this sick little dance has to end.  Maggie gave him a reason to cut her loose, and now it’s Rust’s turn.   _You don’t ever leave somethin’ suffering when you can make a clean break of it, kid._

And truth be told, part of him has wondered for a long fucking time just what it would be like to feel Marty Hart break beneath his hands.

 


End file.
